Separable effects of motives, consequences, and presentation order on children’s moral judgments

The effects of the order of presentation of motive and consequence information on the moral judgments of kindergarten,, second-, and fifth-grade children were examined. Information type (motives vs. consequences) was varied factorially with presentation position (first vs. second) allowing application of recent models of source credibility. Recency effects were obtained at all three ages. Since subjects were required to repeat each story prior to judgment, verbatim memory is unlikely to be the sole cause of recency. The results also showed a developmental shift in the weights of motives and consequences. For fifth graders, evidence suggested that the weight of motives was larger than the weight of consequences, whereas for kindergartners the weight of consequences was larger than the weight of motives. These conclusions do not depend on the assumption that the scale values are developmental ^ static, a necessary assumption in previous research. Following Piaget's (1965) suggestion of a developmental progression from use of consequences toward the use of motives in making moral judgments, work on children's evaluations of the deeds of others first fo-cused on finding the age at which children are capable of considering the motives of others, or the age at which they can be trained to consider the motives of other